awkardly

excerpt from jack, or the submission, play by eugene ionesco

[they put their arms around each other very awkwardly, jack kisses the noses of roberta II, one after the other, while father jack, mother jack, jacqueline, the grandparents, father robert, and mother robert enter without saying a word, one after the other, waddling along, in a sort of ridiculous dance, embarassing, in a vague circle, around jack and roberta II who remain at stage center, awkwardly enlaced. father robert silently and slowly strikes his hands together. mother robert, her arms clasped behind her neck, makes pirouettes, smiling stupidly. mother jack, with an expressionless face, shakes her shoulders in a grotesque fashion. father jack pulls up his pants and walks on his heels. jacqueline nods her head, then they continue to dance, squatting down, while jack and roberta II squat down too, and remain motionless. the grandparents turn around, idiotically, looking at each other, and smiling; then they squat down in their turn. all this must produce in the audience a feeling of embarrassment, awkwardness, and shame. the darkness increases. on stage, the actors utter vague miaows while turning around, bizarre moans, croakings. the darkness increases. we can still see the jacks and roberts crawling on the stage. we hear their animal noises, then we don't see them any more. we hear only their moans, their sighs, then all fades away, all is extinguished. again, a gray light comes on. all the characters have disappeared, except roberta, who is lying down, or rather squatting down, buried beneath her gown. we see only her pale face, with its three noses quivering, and her nine fingers moving like snakes.]

good people

quotes from lady widermere's fan by oscar wilde

"Lord Darlington.  [Still seated L.C.]  Oh, nowadays so many conceited people go about Society pretending to be good, that I think it shows rather a sweet and modest disposition to pretend to be bad.  Besides, there is this to be said.  If you pretend to be good, the world takes you very seriously.  If you pretend to be bad, it doesn’t.  Such is the astounding stupidity of optimism."

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . 

"Lord Darlington.  Do you know I am afraid that good people do a great deal of harm in this world.  Certainly the greatest harm they do is that they make badness of such extraordinary importance.  It is absurd to divide people into good and bad.  People are either charming or tedious.  I take the side of the charming, and you, Lady Windermere, can’t help belonging to them."

an unfinished story

excerpt from the sea-gull by anton chekhov:

 TRIGORIN. I see nothing especially lovely about it. [He looks at his watch] Excuse me, I must go at once, and begin writing again. I am in a hurry. [He laughs] You have stepped on my pet corn, as they say, and I am getting excited, and a little cross. Let us discuss this bright and beautiful life of mine, though. [After a few moments’ thought] Violent obsessions sometimes lay hold of a man: he may, for instance, think day and night of nothing but the moon. I have such a moon. Day and night I am held in the grip of one besetting thought, to write, write, write! Hardly have I finished one book than something urges me to write another, and then a third, and then a fourth—I write ceaselessly. I am, as it were, on a treadmill. I hurry for ever from one story to another, and can’t help myself. Do you see anything bright and beautiful in that? Oh, it is a wild life! Even now, thrilled as I am by talking to you, I do not forget for an instant that an unfinished story is awaiting me. My eye falls on that cloud there, which has the shape of a grand piano; I instantly make a mental note that I must remember to mention in my story a cloud floating by that looked like a grand piano. I smell heliotrope; I mutter to myself: a sickly smell, the colour worn by widows; I must remember that in writing my next description of a summer evening. I catch an idea in every sentence of yours or of my own, and hasten to lock all these treasures in my literary store-room, thinking that some day they may be useful to me. As soon as I stop working I rush off to the theatre or go fishing, in the hope that I may find oblivion there, but no! Some new subject for a story is sure to come rolling through my brain like an iron cannonball. I hear my desk calling, and have to go back to it and begin to write, write, write, once more. And so it goes for everlasting. I cannot escape myself, though I feel that I am consuming my life. To prepare the honey I feed to unknown crowds, I am doomed to brush the bloom from my dearest flowers, to tear them from their stems, and trample the roots that bore them under foot. Am I not a madman? Should I not be treated by those who know me as one mentally diseased? Yet it is always the same, same old story, till I begin to think that all this praise and admiration must be a deception, that I am being hoodwinked because they know I am crazy, and I sometimes tremble lest I should be grabbed from behind and whisked off to a lunatic asylum. The best years of my youth were made one continual agony for me by my writing. A young author, especially if at first he does not make a success, feels clumsy, ill-at-ease, and superfluous in the world. His nerves are all on edge and stretched to the point of breaking; he is irresistibly attracted to literary and artistic people, and hovers about them unknown and unnoticed, fearing to look them bravely in the eye, like a man with a passion for gambling, whose money is all gone. I did not know my readers, but for some reason I imagined they were distrustful and unfriendly; I was mortally afraid of the public, and when my first play appeared, it seemed to me as if all the dark eyes in the audience were looking at it with enmity, and all the blue ones with cold indifference. Oh, how terrible it was! What agony!

NINA. But don’t your inspiration and the act of creation give you moments of lofty happiness?

TRIGORIN. Yes. Writing is a pleasure to me, and so is reading the proofs, but no sooner does a book leave the press than it becomes odious to me; it is not what I meant it to be; I made a mistake to write it at all; I am provoked and discouraged. Then the public reads it and says: “Yes, it is clever and pretty, but not nearly as good as Tolstoi,” or “It is a lovely thing, but not as good as Turgenieff’s ‘Fathers and Sons,’” and so it will always be. To my dying day I shall hear people say: “Clever and pretty; clever and pretty,” and nothing more; and when I am gone, those that knew me will say as they pass my grave: “Here lies Trigorin, a clever writer, but he was not as good as Turgenieff.”

NINA. You must excuse me, but I decline to understand what you are talking about. The fact is, you have been spoilt by your success.


TRIGORIN. What success have I had? I have never pleased myself; as a writer, I do not like myself at all. The trouble is that I am made giddy, as it were, by the fumes of my brain, and often hardly know what I am writing. I love this lake, these trees, the blue heaven; nature’s voice speaks to me and wakes a feeling of passion in my heart, and I am overcome by an uncontrollable desire to write. But I am not only a painter of landscapes, I am a man of the city besides. I love my country, too, and her people; I feel that, as a writer, it is my duty to speak of their sorrows, of their future, also of science, of the rights of man, and so forth. So I write on every subject, and the public hounds me on all sides, sometimes in anger, and I race and dodge like a fox with a pack of hounds on his trail. I see life and knowledge flitting away before me. I am left behind them like a peasant who has missed his train at a station, and finally I come back to the conclusion that all I am fit for is to describe landscapes, and that whatever else I attempt rings abominably false.     

during

from seascape by edward albee:

“NANCY: . . .But I thought: well, if he can turn his back on me like this (Rises.) – nice, isn't it, when the real and the figurative come together – I can turn, too, if not my back, then . . . back.

. . .

NANCY: Hm? (Matter-of-fact.) Knowing how lonely he is . . .substituting . . . using a person, a body, and wishing it was someone else – almost anyone. That void. La petite morte, the French call the moment of climax? And that lovely writer? Who talks of the sadness after love? After intimate intercourse, I think he says? But what of during? What of the loneliness and death then? During. They don't talk of that: the sad fantasies; the substitutions. The thoughts we have. (Tiny pause.) One has.”

from "art"

“Serge  He is getting on my nerves. It’s true.

He’s getting on my nerves.

It’s this ingratiating tone of voice. A little smile behind every word.

It’s as if he’s forcing himself to be pleasant.

Don’t be pleasant, whatever you do, don’t be pleasant!

Could it be buying the Antrios? . . . Could buying the Antrios have triggered off this feeling of constraint between us?

Buying something. . . without his backing? . . .

Well, bugger his backing! Bugger your backing, Marc!

Marc  Could it be the Antrios, buying the Antrios?

No --

It started some time ago. . .

To be precise, it started on the day we were discussing some work of art and you uttered, quite seriously, the word deconstruction.

It wasn’t so much the word deconstruction which upset me, it was the air of solemnity you imbued it with.

You said, humourlessly, unapologetically, without a trace of irony, the word deconstruction, you, my friend.

I wasn’t sure how best to deal with the situation, so I made this throwaway remark, I said I think I must be getting intolerant in my old age, and you answered, who do you think you are? What makes you so high and mighty? . . .

What gives you the right to set yourself apart, Serge answered in the bloodiest possible way. And quite unexpectedly.

You’re just Marc, what makes you think you’re so special?

That day, I should have punched him in the mouth.

And when he was lying there on the ground, half-dead, I should have said to him, you’re supposed to be my friend, what sort of a friend are you, Serge, if you don’t think your friends are special?”

-Yasmina Reza, “Art”